locoloop vs Lokalise

Where we genuinely differ

Client variants

This is the reason locoloop exists. In Lokalise, shipping different wording to different customers means branches — you create one per client, override what differs, and merge from the base branch when the base changes. It works, and teams do it, but the merge is a manual act and the drift is real. By the fifth client it is a job someone owns.

A locoloop custom project is a live overlay instead. Override three keys and the other four thousand read through to the default permanently — not copied, read. Change a default string and every variant that was inheriting it updates on the next pull. Variants that had overridden it keep theirs and get flagged stale so a reviewer can decide. There is no merge step because there is nothing to merge.

Who pays for a seat

Lokalise bills per seat with reviewers included in that count. The practical effect is that asking the Polish-speaking engineer in another team to check forty strings costs money, so it often doesn't happen and the AI draft ships unreviewed.

We bill only editors — people who change strings. Reviewers who approve and viewers who read are free and unlimited, deliberately, because the cheapest quality win in localization is a native speaker who already works at your company.

Your own AI keys

Both platforms do AI translation with glossary and context support, and the output quality is broadly comparable because both are calling the same frontier models. The difference is where you can bring your own key. Lokalise reserves that for Enterprise; we include it from Business. If you already have an Anthropic or OpenAI account with negotiated rates, that changes the cost of high-volume translation substantially.

Where Lokalise is ahead

Breadth

Lokalise handles marketing content, documents and a translator marketplace. If you need your product strings and your campaign copy in one tool, we do not compete — we deliberately do not do the second thing, and running two tools to save a little money is a bad trade.

Certifications and procurement

Lokalise holds formal security certifications. We are EU-hosted, GDPR compliant and will sign a DPA, but we hold none and are not pursuing any. If your security review requires a certificate, we will fail it — that is a straightforward reason to choose them.

SDKs and maturity

If you want a maintained client library for your language rather than an HTTP call, Lokalise ships several and we ship none on purpose. They also have a decade of edge cases handled that we have not hit yet. A platform that has processed billions of strings has fixed bugs we do not know about.

Migrating from Lokalise

Export from Lokalise as XLIFF to keep the most metadata, or in your platform-native format. Import per language into locoloop — existing translations arrive approved rather than as drafts to re-review. Connect the same repository branch and path you already had configured, then swap the endpoint and token in your build script.

Most teams are done in an afternoon. Keep Lokalise live for a sprint while you confirm; nothing stops you exporting from locoloop back into it if you change your mind.